How to choose a Bitcoin or Ethereum Mining contract!

Antonio Madeira
01 Feb 2016

Choosing a cloud mining contract can be difficult - knowing how to price it or whether its a good deal and even if its legit - there are pitfalls left right and center. But here at CryptoCompare we've tried to make the process as seamless and easy as possible by creating a set of metrics to give you an idea of exactly how an ethereum, bitcoin or litecoin mining contract works.

You can rank and filter by companies and return by day or reviews in our mining contract list. You can filter by what you want to mine or how long the contract will last.

Profitability

Some contracts aren't even profitable with present market rates. We calculate the profitability by seeing how many days the contract takes to pay back the money invested. We do this by working out the daily return given the present hashrate of your contract and the network and then subtracting the appropriate fee if necessary. The figures we use can be found at the bottom of the page as shown in the picture below.

We also give a wealth of other information - such as the expected return per year - the 174% above means the contract will pay you back your initial investment of $899 dollars and give you a return of 74% on top. We also show you the cost per MH/s, the return per week, month and year - all depending on the network hash rate which is 628 GH/s and exchange rate of $2.12 - these can vary a lot so the returns that we show can vary a lot - these are just best guesstimates using our data - which we take a lot of pride in.

Some contracts only exist for a certain amount of time. They might exist for three months yet have a payback period of over a year. This way you will never get your money back. If our payback period says never, it means that you will never get your money back as the fee exceeds the revenue the contract generates per day, or the payback period is longer than the duration of the contract.

We also give another metric called the profit ratio per day. This shows you how much the revenue exceeds the fee per day. In the case of the genesis mining ethereum contract this is 100% as there are no fees. However on the 15 TH bitcoin mining contract shown below the profit ratio is 81% meaning the revenue exceeds the fee by 81%.

Scam Contracts - Proof of Mining

A lot of contracts appear and then seem to payout for a period giving an air of legitimacy. Then suddenly they stop paying and a suspiciously similar website with similar offerings reappears. We list some new providers but issue warnings at the top of the page if we believe the provider has not given sufficient evidence of their Bitcoin mining operations. Ideally we want them to give us a guided tour of their facilities on Skype, and we believe that if they don't do this then something is up! You can read more about how to detect a cloud mining contract scam here.

Reviews

We also provide reviews for all our cloud mining contracts so you can see what other people have experienced with the provider.

Devil in the Details - Mining Contract Legal Jargon

Some mining contracts terminate when they become unprofitable. You need to read the contract carefully to see if this is the case. Some providers own your contract until it pays back what it owes for being kept on when it is unprofitable - and only then do you start receiving payouts again.

So a word to the wise - read the fine print!

Also due to the razor thin margins of the industry, and the huge amounts of volatility involved, make sure you are aware that some Companies, even if they are legitimate (or trying to be), can go out of business in the blink of an eye. Caveat Emptor!

If you have any views on how to make this clearer and make sure no-one else gets ripped off by unscrupulous providers - please let us know in the comments section below - and lets clean up this industry for the benefit of everyone!